


and one of us

by galamiel



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:05:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galamiel/pseuds/galamiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard's gone, and Garrus only has photos to remember her by. Some reference to the Citadel DLC.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and one of us

All he had left of her were pictures.

The most recent one was from just a few months earlier, one Glyph had taken without their knowledge at that party she had thrown during shore leave. His arm was wrapped around her waist and he was doubling over in laughter at some inane comment she had made. She was looking up at him and smiling, soft wrinkles around her mouth and the corners of her dark eyes.

It was one of the last times he had seen her smile.

He remembered that night, exploring every inch of her body just as he had the first time they’d slept together, back before the Omega-4 relay. She was buzzed and giggling, constantly pulling him back to her face to cover him in warm kisses, wrapping her arms around him. They were not usually gentle with each other during lovemaking, not since they had found a pattern and come to know each others bodies, but they were that night. They were tender and quiet, clinging to each other in a pile of tangled limbs, her face pressed against his hard chest and his nuzzled into her short hair.

There was one Liara took when Shepard had treated the crew to lunch on the Citadel before Udina’s attempted coup. She’d accidentally drank from his cup, ingesting a mouthful of burning, definitely dextro liquid. The picture was of her, post-spitting it out, face screwed up in disgust, tongue stuck out. James had been howling, thought it was the most hilarious thing he had ever seen. The marine had wiped tears from his eyes and turned to him and asked, “So, Scars, lemme guess - Lola doesn’t swallow?” Joker choked on his water at that, nostrils flaring, and even Shepard had been laughing too hard to do more than make a vague threat about putting Vega on mess duty for the rest of the war.

He had a picture from back before they’d even met, just after she’d joined the navy, even before her famous role in the Skyllian Blitz. It was a formal picture, the Alliance flag standing in as the backdrop. She was expressionless, hair longer than he’d ever seen it on her before and pulled back into a strict bun, beret tilted just right, her face strangely bare, unfamiliar. He knew every freckle on that face, but the younger Shepard in the picture lacked any of the silvery scars that he’d come to know and love, was completely bare of the faint red glow of mostly-healed cybernetics. He’d gotten the picture from her personnel file - he’d looked it up after she’d been made the first human spectre, and, for some reason, he’d never gotten rid of it.

He was glad he hadn’t.

One was taken back on the SR-1, Ashley, Kaidan, Wrex, Tali, Liara, he and Shepard standing in front of the Mako, back before Virmire. Ashley looked disgruntled, Shepard and Kaidan acting as a buffer between her and the nonhuman crew members. He’d overheard Shepard chewing out Ashley for racism one day, wondered why an earthborn human like Shepard, constantly attacked and looked down upon by nonhumans, would defend them so vehemently. He’d come to realize that that was just the kind of person Shepard was - no matter what hardships she faced, she would not blame a species for them. “Everyone deserves a chance to prove themselves,” she’d said once. “I wouldn’t judge you based on the First Contact War, or on what Saren’s doing.”

He didn’t have many photos. Some of the rest were blurry, stills taken from visor recordings. There were a few of her making faces at him, one of her attempting to arm wrestle Wrex (and apparently she’d never learned from the experience, because he knew he had one of her trying the same thing with Grunt), one of her hefting Vega over her shoulder to win a bet, playing poker with the crew, giving a wounded Tali a piggyback back to the shuttle, kissing Liara’s cheek.

There were only a handful of pictures of the both of them, and none of them showed just how much he loved her. Too many of the pictures had people in between them, were taken before they had even realized their mutual attraction. But there was one he treasured more than any other picture.

It must have been Vega who had taken it, sent it to him. Looking back on it, he vaguely remembered a message from brawny marine shortly before London ( _“knew you two were a thing at first glance. thought you might like this, scars.”_ )

It was taken in the shuttle, just after they had “rescued” Primarch Victus. He and Shepard were sitting hip-to-hip, shoulder-to-shoulder, his arm slung around the back of her seat. They were looking at each other, dirty and wounded and bloody, a red gash across Shepard’s forehead and several blue scrapes across the vulnerable skin of his neck where his armor hadn’t quite covered him, and, despite the horror and destruction they’d just left behind, Shepard was smiling at him, and he had obviously made no move to hide how he felt about her, wearing an expression of devotion, mandibles flared in a distinctly turian grin.

He wondered what it’d be like to express grief the way that Shepard did. He’d held her before as she cried, sobs wracking her body and tears running down her cheeks. Her face had gone splotchy red and she’d looked younger than he’d ever imagined she could, and now he felt, briefly, regret that he could not grieve like that for her, not with that amount of raw emotion.

He grieved for her in his own way. He kept the photos, put a few in holoframes and placed them around his tiny home on the beach. He spoke to her during the day, verbally when he was alone, silently when he was not, and occasionally he waited for her to respond - something he had done the first time she had died, too, but this time he was not a shell of the man he had once been, living off of stims and sheer will, and this time her ghost did not haunt him, did not speak a word to him. He wondered whether he would have rathered her to haunt him than to live alone. He appropriated her bedding, their bedding, from the _Normandy_ , slept in it until it lost the smell of her, burned it and inhaled the smoke. He dreamt of kissing her, running his talons through her hair, tracing every curve of her figure, sleeping with her wrapped in his arms, but when he woke up he was alone.

All he had left were pictures.


End file.
